


Siren Song

by areyouarealmonster



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: AU where Kristen/Isabella isn't a fucking plot device, Gen, POV Original Female Character, and not either of them, kind of, she's Kristen and Isabella
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 06:58:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13565268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/areyouarealmonster/pseuds/areyouarealmonster
Summary: She wakes up from death the second time as someone else, someone who doesn’t love Edward. Someone who used to love Edward. She wakes up the second time alone in a glowing green cave, cold and alone, and she walks out with all her memories.Or, an AU where Kristen Kringle and Isabella were the same person, where she becomes yet someone else, and she maybe figures out who she is without being a fucking plot device.





	Siren Song

She’s woken up as someone else before, so it’s not a surprise when she wakes this time. It would be more of a surprise if she didn’t, probably. If she stayed dead, in her plot in the cemetery that she doesn’t think she ever made it to.

 

It was after Edward was arrested when they dug her body up the first time, they’d told her, deep underground in the bowels of Arkham. He’d overturned her grave, deep in the woods, and they’d pulled her body out. It was cold, always cold, and she hadn’t _really_ started to decay yet. Anyway, they fixed that, they said.

 

Her eyes were replaced—squishy stuff always goes first—and they gave her a fresh start. A new memory. She didn’t remember all the things at first, didn’t remember much until Edward wrapped a hand around her neck.

 

Then, oh then, she remembered.

 

For a minute.

 

It didn’t stick, because Edward was kissing her, and oh, she loved him.

 

That was something _they_ did, too, though. Whoever woke her up, secreted her away, kept her locked up until they needed her. They told her she loved Edward and she believed them.

 

Isabella loved him, she loved him with everything that she had.

 

Kristen, though, hated him the second he showed her who he really was.

 

She wakes up from death the second time as someone else, someone who doesn’t love Edward. Someone who used to love Edward. She wakes up the second time alone in a glowing green cave, cold and alone, and she walks out with all her memories.

 

Well, she thinks it’s all her memories. She wouldn’t know if she was missing any, but she tries not to think too hard about it.

 

She’s been a redhead and a blonde, and she wakes up a blonde this time, too. White-blonde, the red she’d dyed it for Edward faded out. It doesn’t take long for her to change that. She shaves half her head, hacks at the rest until it’s short, and she dyes it black. She ditches the glasses for contacts.

 

She’s been a record keeper and a librarian and she’s been a plant and a seductress and she’s worked for an unknown entity and driven a wedge in between the mayor and his— _Edward_. Now she’s adrift, and all she knows is that she doesn’t ever want to work for anyone like that again. She’s her own person now, the way she used to be when she was Kristen, before Edward took her life with his hands tight around her throat.

 

She became her own person again when she woke up for the second time, gasping back to life, breath flooding her lungs.

 

It’s hard at first, even though somehow, someone, whoever brought her back this time, gave her a place to start. There’s a key and a furnished apartment and a bank account and she doesn’t know who her mysterious benefactor is but she’s not their pawn, not this time. She takes her money out and she walks out of the apartment with half of the stuff they gave her, and she makes her own way.

 

At first she uses the beautiful, expensive makeup to cover up the scars on the left side of her face. The scars left from being hit by the train. From _dying_. Her skin is uneven and marred, and she fills it in with foundation and concealer and that mostly hides it.

 

Nobody would know she’d been dead. Not so long as she avoids the police station, as long as she avoids _him_.

 

She takes a number of odd jobs, here and there, cataloguing for the Gotham Museum, a special project for the corporate library at Wayne Enterprises, just little things all over the city. Never in one place for too long. That’s how they’ll find her, and she’s not _theirs_.

 

Of course, you can only do odd archivist jobs for too long before you become a name. Before people start to talk about the woman with chopped-off black hair that goes blonde at the roots sometimes. About the woman who wears caked-on makeup and is sweet to everyone and does her job well. The archival community is too small, talks too much.

 

But, well, this is Gotham, isn’t it? And you can be anyone you want in Gotham.

 

Not-Kristen-but-not-Isabella-either starts to hear rumors of a female gang who run an armory together, and she thinks: ‘Oh, I wonder if they have a bookkeeper.’

 

Turns out they don’t.

 

She doesn’t tell them much about herself, not even her name—whatever it is now, not Kristen and not Isabella and not anything at all—and they don’t press. The leader, Barbara, calls her ‘sweetie,’ ‘softie,’ ‘little pet.’ Words and phrases that roll off the tongue and maybe should sting, but don’t. She doesn’t mind the names. They’re better than the ones that used to be hers but aren’t anymore.

 

The job provides her anonymity and stability. And protection—that too. Tabitha, severe and sharp as she is beautiful, teaches her how to protect herself. Even though not-Kristen still feels more comfortable in what Barbara condescendingly refers to as ‘those boring school-teacher clothes’ and not in the shiny leather that the other women wear, she still lets them mold her into something harder.

 

Something pointed, with teeth.

 

She’s never had teeth before, not like this. She’s had brass and backbone, and she’s been brash, both as Kristen and Isabella, but she’s never had to be hard.

 

She’s not sure she likes it, but it’s survival, here.

 

The customers have to know to leave her alone. And they do. They do.

 

Until the day that _he_ walks through the door.

 

* * *

 

 

She thinks Barbara has guessed by this point who she used to be.

 

She’s stopped wearing makeup. It’s not that the girls haven’t offered to steal her the good stuff, it’s not that she doesn’t have the cash to go out and buy it, but she sees so many people walk through those doors with scars on their face like it’s their life story written out in broken, mismatched skin.

 

So, one day she just stops. She walks in and the eyes follow her all the way to her desk, but nobody says anything. She doesn’t wear her scars with pride, exactly, but she wears them with those teeth she’s learned to bare. Fewer and fewer eyes follow her each day, until she becomes part of the scenery, which she prefers.

 

So when Edward walks in that day, he doesn’t notice her at first, with her short black hair and the patterns of scars on her face. She’s part of the scenery.

 

But, oh, she notices him. She watches him argue with Barbara, snipping back and forth in the way that Barbara does with the people that aren’t quite her friends but aren’t quite her enemies, either.

 

He’s alone, slightly unkempt, his eyes less focused than she remembers, his hair messier than it was when she was Isabella but still shorter than it was when she was Kristen.

 

Mostly, she hates how much she remembers about him, hates how much she still feels for him.

 

Barbara’s eyes find her briefly and, oh yeah, she knows exactly who not-Isabella is.

 

The negotiation finishes, and Barbara directs Edward towards the raised dias, where customers come to pay. Where not-Kristen-and-not-Isabella sits.

 

He holds out a small gun, looking through her, and says, “Barbara says I can get twenty percent off on this.”

 

“ _Ten_ percent, girlie, don’t give him a cent less off!” Barbara calls over her shoulder.

 

Edward rolls his eyes, and Isabella rears her pathetic, sad, head with a burst of affection for the man standing in front of her. Kristen butts in before Isabella can moon too long, though, with a flood of acute, hot rage at the man who killed her. The man she liked well enough, until he killed her. The man she loved, after he killed her.

 

And then he looks at her. Really, actually looks at her, his eyes fixing onto hers. “ _Isabella_?” he asks, his voice a horrified whisper.

 

Isabella loves him. Kristen hates him. Whoever she is now takes the reins. “Will that be all, Mr. Nygma?” she asks, her voice steady and unwavering and full to the brim of cold indifference.

 

He's not so tough, standing in front of her. He's not so magnetic, not anymore, now that she's not Isabella. Now that she's…someone else.

 

“ _Miss Kringle_?” he asks, in that same breathy whisper.

 

“Neither,” she answers, recording the sale into her book. “Although I've been both.”

 

He gapes like a fish at her, that oversized mouth that's been on every part of her body limp in its confusion. “What?” he asks dully.

 

She sighs. It’s easier to be cold with Barbara and Tabitha and Cat to teach her how, to stare her down from their various places around the room. Clearly they all know who she is to him, and Cat comes up to the dias to stand behind her, to keep an eye on her. To keep her cold.

 

It’s easier to stay cold, too, with the memory of his hands around her throat. As Kristen, that is. Isabella liked those long fingers tight around her neck.

 

“Nobody stays dead in Gotham,” she says, parroting words she’s heard Barbara say time and time again. “You killed me. I woke up. Then your friend killed me, and I woke up again. That’s all.”

 

“But you remember—”

 

“Everything.” In theory. She remembers a cupcake with a bullet, she remembers sitting on the steps all night, she remembers dinners, the press of his lips, the push of him into her. She remembers feelings, faded like old curtains, dust floating into the air as she runs her fingers along them.

 

“And Isabella?” he asks, an incomplete thought, but she fills it in anyway. She knows what he wants to know.

 

“She was real,” she answers. “And she was me. And I was Kristen, too, originally.”

 

“Who are you, now?”

 

That’s the question, isn’t it? She’s not Kristen: not naive, not willing to throw herself at bad men in the hopes that she can make them better. She’s not Isabella: not single-focused on her goal without knowing why. Focused on Edward and Edward alone.

 

So who is she?

 

“I’m a siren,” she says, finally. “And no man will lead me to my death ever again.”

 

That doesn’t mean anything to him, she can see it in his eyes. But it rings true for her, the words dropping into place as she says them.

 

“I’m Siren,” she says, adjusting the cadence and emphasis so it’s a name, not a word, now. “Will that be cash or check?”

 

Edward hands her a bundle of cash, confusion still written large all over his face. He doesn’t ask again, though. Maybe he finally understands a dismissal when he’s on the receiving end of one. Siren doubts it. It’s probably the way Cat is looking at him, hand on her whip.

 

When he leaves, Barbara comes over to her. She leans against the desk, arms crossed, just waiting.

 

Siren finishes the sale, marking the product as sold and recounting the cash before putting it in the lockbox in front of her. Once that’s done, she looks up, meeting Barbara’s steady and piercing gaze.

 

“My name is Siren,” she says.

 

“Oh, I heard you, sweetie,” Barbara says, voice sweet like a bee sting. “You know, I used to own a club called The Sirens.”

 

“Did you?”

 

Barbara nods. She glances over at the handful of customers still browsing. “Get out!” she calls, bruque and firm. “We’re closing early.”

 

* * *

 

 

Barbara takes Siren, Tabitha, and Cat to a spa.

 

Well, more like Roman baths.

 

Siren has never been to anything like this. She stands at the edge of the steaming water in her robe after Barbara and Tabitha have stripped to naked and sunk into the pool, after Cat perches on the edge in short swim trunks and a tank-top, making ripples in the water with her legs.

 

“Come in, already,” Tabitha beckons.

 

“Sit with me,” Cat offers.

 

“Don’t just stand there,” Barbara orders.

 

Siren drops her robe. She steps into the water, heat making her head spin as she walks into the oversized and mostly-empty pool. Nobody visits the baths at eleven on a Tuesday night, apparently. It’s just the four of them, their voices echoing off the high ceilings.

 

She settles in, the water making the scars down her left side blurry, changing shape as the surface ripples and swells.

 

Silence falls, the only noise in the hall the sounds of soft breathing and dripping water.

 

It’s Tabitha who breaks it, looking over at Siren with an incredulous look. “ _Nygma_?” she asks, voice full of disgust. “ _Really_?”

 

Siren shrugs.

 

“I mean, when Babs told me who you were,” Tabitha continues, “I thought for _sure_ you were just gonna be some freak, but you’re like, weirdly normal. Kinda boring, actually.”

 

Boring is fine. Boring, Siren can handle. “I wasn’t...myself, when I was Isabella,” she explains.

 

“What’d’ya mean?” Cat asks.

 

Siren isn’t sure how to explain it, she’s still in between putting together the pieces and trying not to think about it. But Edward showed up, and these girls seem to know more than they’d been letting on. So she might as well tell them what she knows about her previous life. _Lives_.

 

“I was born Kristen Kringle,” she says. Cat and Tabitha nod, coaxing her on. Barbara just stares off, her eyes unfocused on the far wall. “I met Edward at work, at the GCPD.”

 

“I know this part,” Tabitha says shortly.

 

“I don’t,” Cat argues.

 

“Let her talk,” Barbara says, still gazing at the middle distance straight ahead.

 

“He creeped me out at first,” Siren continues. Those words are met with a short, sharp nod from Tabitha, but nobody chimes in. “Then, I suppose, he was the better option.”

 

Cat snorts.

 

“Then he killed me, so, I guess I was wrong about that,” Siren finishes.

 

“Have you ever considered _not_ dating men?” Tabitha asks, brusque as always.

 

“You’re one to talk,” Barbara says, her voice steady and calm even though the words are harsh. “What about Butch?”

 

“At least Butch didn’t _kill me_ ,” Tabitha shoots back. “Oh, but _you_ killed _him_.”

 

The two women snip back and forth at each other as Siren and Cat just watch.

 

“Are they always like this outside of the armory?” Siren asks, finally.

 

Cat nods. “Pretty much.”

 

Siren slides down further into the water, resting her head back against the curve of the wall. She closes her eyes and she can see the shape of the room from the sounds bouncing around, the harsh words bandied back and forth covering for what she can see is pain and hurt between the two of them.

 

“Hey!” Cat finally yells. “Siren was telling her story!”

 

Siren opens her eyes again, to see all the other eyes in the room on her.

 

“So,” Barbara prompts, not a bit ashamed of her tiff with Tabitha, “what was the deal with little Miss Isabella?”

 

“You know,” Tabitha cuts in, “Nygma cut off my fucking hand while he was trying to figure out who killed you.”

 

“ _Tabitha_ ,” Barbara scolds.

 

Siren, though, examines the wrist that Tabitha holds out to her before she speaks. She sees the scar, so unlike her own scars but still carrying the lines of loss.

 

“I’m sorry,” she apologizes.

 

“Not _your_ damn fault, unless you made Penguin kill you.”

 

Silence.

 

“Shit,” Tabitha says. “ _Did_ you?”

 

“I don’t know,” Siren answers. She thinks back to when she woke up as Isabella. Well, really, when she woke up as nobody. “They made me... _love_ Edward.”

 

“ _Who_ made you?” Cat asks.

 

Siren shrugs. “They never told me. No names, except for the one they gave me. They told me that I was made to love him, and I believed them. I was, I was kept locked away until they needed me. It wasn’t by accident I was in the liquor store when Edward was. It wasn’t a chance meeting.”

 

Tabitha leans forward. “So,” she says, “this _mysterious entity_ that brought you back _wanted_ you to drive a wedge between Penguin and Nygma?”

 

“Yes, I think so,” Siren says. “I suppose it worked.”

 

Barbara laughs, the sound spinning through the room in eddies and gusts. “Oh, it worked, little pet. It worked.”

 

“You were brainwashed, then?” Tabitha presses.

 

“Whatever it was that they did, it made me love Edward. I didn’t even love him before he killed me, when I was Kristen,” Siren explains.

 

“You were _bait_ ,” Tabitha growls. “If I find whoever did this to you…” she trails off, her face set in a snarl.

 

“That’s why I brought her back,” Barbara drawls. The words ping like drips into the steaming, rippling water.

 

“You _what_?” Tabitha half-shouts.

 

Siren doesn’t process the words, initially. But she blinks, and sees a cave. She blinks, and sees a green glow, a deep pool. She blinks and breathes in musky air, mold and mice and critters and that toxic glow.

 

“Oh, I brought her back to life,” Barbara says casually. “Besides the fact that I _love_ fucking with Nygma, I needed a reliable bookkeeper. The Court of Owls can kiss my ass. Or, they could, if they weren’t all dead.”

 

“You brought me back?” Siren asks, confounded. Lost, lost, adrift.

 

Barbara smiles at her like a hawk to a mouse. No, like a hawk to a sparrow: ‘I won’t eat you, probably, but I could.’

 

“I don’t like innocent women being used as bait,” she says. “As much as I don’t want Pengy and Nygma to rule Gotham—this is _my_ domain—I suppose the same could have been accomplished by letting them get together. They would’ve been so wrapped up in each other that Gotham would have been easy to take. So yes, my sweet Siren, I brought you back. You’re _welcome_.”

 

Barbara’s voice is sweet like honey, full of venom, and she speaks like her word is law. And somehow, it makes Siren feel safe. Barbara is terrifying; dizzying in her assuredness and worrisome in her interests. And yet, still, Siren isn’t scared of _her_.

 

“How did you know I’d find my way to you?” Siren asks, finally. She remembers the spacious apartment, full of trinkets. The bank account, the clothes, the makeup. The gifts. She remembers leaving half of them behind.

 

“This is Gotham,” Barbara answers. “And here, lost girls tend to find their way to me.” She lifts her arms out of the water, posing dramatically, at sharp angles against the water. “I’m like a female Peter Pan.”

 

Tabitha laughs, Cat joining in. Siren feels dizzy with it all, the emotions flowing through her like waves on the sand. Flowing out, flowing in, sucking up sand and rocks and little creatures underfoot.

 

For the first time, she feels alive. Or maybe that’s just the heat, getting to her head.

 

She laughs, starting small and then building, until her laughter fills the room from floor to domed ceiling, bouncing off the surface of the water. Until all she is is laughter.

 

“There she is,” Barbara says, proud like a mother hyena, when the room falls silent again. “That’s my Siren. Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on tumblr at jewishgarygreen


End file.
